A 25-year-old CEO emailed Mark Cuban to pitch his anti-fake-news startup for investment — and it worked

Factmata is a British startup trying to tackle the
growing problem of fake news and misinformation, with the help
of artificial intelligence.

It has raised a seed round from high-profile US
investors including billionaire Mark Cuban, Zynga founder Mark
Pincus, and Brightmail founder Sunil Paul.

CEO Dhruv Ghulati said there's demand for a service
that scores news articles for quality and adds
context.

Most investors won't even consider a startup pitch unless they
know the founders or have had a "warm intro" to them.

But 25-year-old Dhruv Gulati may be the exception to the rule,
after he emailed billionaire investor Mark Cuban without any
introduction to pitch his anti-fake-news startup Factmata — and
persuaded Cuban to invest.

Cuban has now participated in its seed round, along with Zynga
founder Mark Pincus and Brightmail founder Sunil Paul.

"I had a key list of people I wanted to have on board," Ghulati
told Business Insider, adding that Cuban was among them. "Every
single investor we have has some element of being extremely
strategic and important for the business. It was about making
that clear to the investor, as opposed to just, 'Why am I
randomly emailing you?'"

Factmata wants to use artificial intelligence to tackle the
proliferation of fake and misleading news. The startup aims to be
a cross between Wikipedia and Quora, with a community of users
fact-checking or marking news articles for quality with the help
of AI. Those users may include everyday internet users but also
journalists.

The startup is building its first product for launch next year: a
news aggregator designed to show a quality score and offer extra
links for context. Eventually, Factmata may offer its underlying
technology to public-relations firms, media outlets, and other
organisations for a fee.

Ghulati's thesis is that journalism's prevalent ad-funded model
has encouraged news outlets to pursue eyeballs through
sensationalism and misinformation. The rise of that model online
coincides with the decline of the
subeditor in newsrooms, the people who rigorously check
articles before they are published.

A journalist may be skeptical that any kind of quality-checking
on articles can be outsourced to machine learning. But Ghulati
said it was about building tools to assist, not replace, the
fact-checking process.

He said: "Not all of it can be done with machine learning.
Hopefully there'll also be input gathered from a big community of
users, the Wikipedia model. That's what we're aiming for, a
credibility score on information."

The team has a strong pedigree. Its chief technology officer,
Robert Stojnic, was formerly a developer at Wikipedia, building
out the platform's search function. And Ghulati's cofounders are
two machine-learning specialists: UCL reader Sebastian
Riedel and University of Sheffield lecturer Andreas
Vlachos.

"I was impressed by the team's pedigree, technical talent, and
sheer drive to solve this problem," Cuban said in a statement.

"If we want to solve fake news, thinking about it at web scale
via artificial intelligence and automation is the only way. And
being outside the media or fact checking world allows them to see
the problem in a different way. Factmata is a group of
entrepreneurs trying to solve a challenging problem with an
amazing mission."

Ghulati is sceptical that Facebook can solve the fake-news
problem by itself.

"We're a platform fully focused on quality of information," he
said. "With Facebook, it's not in their model, it's not what they
think about. And they're ads-incentivised. Clearly there's a
demand from the public to solve these problems, and whether
platforms can do that to an adequate level — who knows? But we're
100% focused on it."